Kodak EasyShare CX7300

Opinion: Now that it's 2 weeks past the guarantee Kodak has "kindly" offered to fix it for a nominal fee..It now won't turn on...Planned Obselesence ,Perfection...

Opinion: You get what you pay for and for $100 you don't get much. My wife wanted a simple "purse camera" that she can take everywhere with her. The studio cameras are about 8x bigger and 15x heavier but she is happy. I wouldn't use this thing unless it was the only working camera I had left and even then I would hate to. I've had a Olympus C-3000z that ran circles aroud this camera...of course it cost 5 times more but it produced great 16x20's. I bet this Kodak can't produce a 8x10 worth a flip. I hate that I sold the C-3000z a while back. Oh well...as I said, she seams happy with it.

Opinion: I bought that for my daughter's 7th birthday. She was willing a camera and I didn't her use my expensive Nikon gear. I did some research and found this little camera very easy to use for her, and with buil in memory. It uses 2 AA bateries and no extra memory card requiered, for a kid that's great.

The image quality is good for a $89 dollars camera, it could have a lens cover to avoid scratching it, it has no zoom, but can record some videos with a nice quality.

It is comparable with the common 35mm point an shoot cameras that many people used to have without any zoom capability.

Opinion: Owning a Canon EOS 10D, Canon A80 and Ixus30 I have made some comparisons (of course):
Positive points:
- little purple fringing and little flare
- decent resolution, good colours (not great), but it looks pretty enough as long as you won't print larger than 5x7". Kodak certainly has a prettier look than e.g. HP or cheap Panasonics.
- robust housing, not too tiny.
- can be used by grandmom
- good battery life (unlike earlier DX3600 etc.)
- Cheapest brand camera around, often on offer.
- always ready to shoot (learn from this, Canon!)
- predictable shutter lag (lens is fixed focus, fixed aperture), which is less worrysome than having to wait for 'it' to focus (like Canon A80 tends to do sometimes). It means less o.o.f. pics.
-It's EASY! (although Easyshare is marketing bullshit: you'll have to buy a docking station to connect to a printer, blabla and so on. Don't buy that stuff))

Negative points:
- Needs much light. Forget inside photography if it isn't very well lit, or use flash. What do you expect with a fixed f4.5 aperture and max. ISO200? Indoors you'll go to a shutter time of more than 1/10 s if not using flash. You try to keep that still.. (flash is always 1/60 s)
- Ugly flash: darkish in corners. Only good for closer shots.
- Shortest focus distance of about 80cm inhibits taking close portraits (lens is '37mm equivalent')
- no zoom limits your composition creativity.

Conclusion: What I like most is that it always fires with predictable focus result, but it will have to use flash under slighty dimmer situations.

Would I recommend it? Yes, if you pay less than 75$, unless the next cheapest thing is 99$ with zoomlens of comparable quality.

Get it 2nd hand, there's enough of them. It is certainly quicker, easier to use & less powerhungry than most older digicams offered at the same price!